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The Art of Politics

Boxes

(I of II)

By Judy Osborne

When the Benjamin Association considered the first version of the Standards of Care in 1979, the drafters wrote them with a very specific purpose in mind. They just needed to separate transsexuals who were good candidates for hormone therapy and surgery from everybody else. The unfortunate side effect of this either/or thinking, though, turned out to be that our young community adopted the same classification system as its very own.

The box the Benjamin people built for transsexuals was awfully small. The early gender researchers said a candidate for surgery needed to show a lifelong history as a femmy boy or butch girl, be heterosexual in the gender of destination, hate the genitals he or she was born with, look good enough to pass, possess employment skills proper to the gender of destination, be convinced from earliest memories of having being born into the wrong body, never have enjoyed cross dressing nor found any sexual stimulation in it, and (MTF) love to knit or (FTM) fix cars (well no, they didn’t go quite that far, but I’ll bet things like that made a difference). Somebody who could demonstrate all those characteristics, or lie convincingly enough, was thought to be very special and very committed.

Everybody else got tossed into a huge box for just transvestites (also known as just crossdressers).

That was then. These days we find ourselves dealing with unclassifiables like non-op, hormone-taking androgynes possessing ambiguous genitalia who live almost full-time in some kind of gender, and hordes of other types who seem to be discovering equally interesting variations. It has thrown our simple binary world into chaos! What, in a word, do we call them??? What status do we give them???

How about calling them Stephanie or David or Kelly or Brett or Leslie or whatever their name is and giving them the same status we can learn to give all the variations in our community?

It’s natural to want to classify people, if for no other reason than to identify where a person falls in the pecking order or whether he or she would be a suitable friend. Scientists become obsessive about drawing boxes around everybody so they can attach their names to the most current hierarchy. The public amuse themselves by trying to figure out what apparatus we’re hiding in our underwear and which restroom we’re aiming toward.

But do we really need to keep on building our own boxes and shoving everybody into one or another of them? Post-op’s climb into their tree houses and pull up the ladders behind them. Clubs demote transpeople when they discover they’re gay or transsexual. We doubt the commitment of an MTF who lives as a woman but does man things once in a while to preserve otherwise-lost relationships, or an FTM who shops for a dress to go home to a wedding, or a post-op MTF who works as a guy because she’s scared, or an FTM who revisits a lesbian bar to recapture something he misses. We sometimes look down on an MTF who dresses up because she likes the humiliation it implies in a male-dominated society, or another who dresses as a baby girl. We’re uncomfortable when we can’t classify people who have breast augmentation without SRS, or who blend genders in multifaceted but creative ways, or who identify as the opposite gender but don’t try very hard to portray that gender, and it makes us crazy. We’re forever judging transpeople’s sexual orientations, even though we haven’t even begun to agree among ourselves on a definition that makes any sense at all in relation to gender-fluid people. We assign lower status to people we judge to be not passable.

Lots of members of straight society, and a few gay people as well, have a box for us. It’s a big one. All transgender people fit inside. All our individual differences fade away. Our humanity, our giving spirit, our ability to nurture, our accomplishments, our intelligence, our humor, none of these special parts of our characters makes any difference to bigots.

We ask society to tolerate and even accept us, but we haven’t learned to tolerate and accept each other. Maybe that’s the first step.


Your comments, in support or in disagreement, will be gratefully received -- heyjude@eskimo.com

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